Description
Marshall is on his vigilante shit and everyone else is uncomfortably aware of it. It’s a poorly kept secret in his small Georgia town that if you ask Marshall to kill your abusive parent he’ll do it and hardly ask any questions. He’s too focused on the end of the world to ponder the ethics-though if you ask him directly, surviving the apocalypse isn’t really the priority. It’s just good to be prepared.
When a twelve year old kid named Beaver approaches Marshall to inquire his services, Marshall makes the dual mistake of getting attached to the kid and thinking himself untouchable. When the consequences of his careless actions finally catch up to him, Marshall is forced to skip town with Beaver, the selectively mute unrequited love of his life, Jamie, and their mutual friend, Lana, who has inexplicably decided to quit cold turkey and choose sobriety on the open road.
Searching for free will amidst the silent collapse of surveillance state America, a series of seemingly random events will challenge each of their understanding of what it means to be good, which choices are ours and which are made for us. From a convenience store run by children to a strange diner ready to collapse into the earth to an eco-sustainable cult they each swear they’re too smart to get indoctrinated into, Marshall and his friends must decide who they are, what they’d like to cling to at the end of the world-and most importantly, if it’s even worth surviving.
Ian Barr –
Going into Mars in Retrograde I thought I knew what to expect. The problem is that while the synopsis provides you with the bare bones of the novel, it does not brace you for the raw, honest brutality that the characters are about to face, be the challenges subtle or shocking.
The character work is what really shines in MiR, each of the characters so complex and layered that they stick in your soul as you see bits of them that remind you of people you know in real life—Maybe even seeing a bit of yourself in their strife. You want the best for them despite watching them make bad decision after bad decision, justifying their means as they approach the end by whatever fucked up logic they have garbled together along the way. They may come from horrible circumstances but I think most people can relate to some of the trauma they have experienced on some level. Abusive or absentee parents that hand down their trauma with silence or fists; addiction and substance abuse to avoid reality; homophobia and prejudice; and the looming pressures of a broken world teetering on the brink of societal and ecological collapse, all while trying to find any manner of guidance in navigating such a reality.
I’d honestly pitch this book to so many different people that I don’t really know how to properly recommend it. Is it a thriller? Yes. A queer romance? Kind of, yeah. Is it an introspective look into the fragility and adaptability of the human psyche? Yep. What about a dark comedy? Yes sir, that too. Something of a coming of age story? Mmhmm. There are too many ways to describe Mars in Retrograde, a story with so many facets, and you’re just going to have to grab a copy and go on the trip yourself.
What I will say for certain is that Mars in Retrograde is a challenging read. Not in structure, as Worth’s prose paints a picture effortlessly and without restraint. The descriptions of the weird, wonderful, mundane, and morose aspects of our world are one thing, but Worth also leaps seamlessly between not only inner and outer beauty but also inner and outer repulsion. No, the challenging part of MiR is in the finer details, as any earnest work tends to be. There are a lot of hard scenes where no gritty, mean details are spared as each wound, scar, and bruise is laid bare, be they self-inflicted or otherwise. It’s not a story for the faint of heart but it’s worth every gut punch along the way. I guarantee it.